1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to electronic design automation (EDA). More specifically, this disclosure relates to methods and apparatuses for efficiently performing area recovery using a zone-based approach.
2. Related Art
Area recovery is an important operation in an electronic design automation (EDA) flow. Area recovery is used to reduce the die-size of an integrated circuit. Furthermore, area recovery can facilitate design convergence: the recovered area can be used at a later stage in the design flow for satisfying design requirements.
Unfortunately, conventional area recovery techniques are inefficient. Specifically, since area recovery is typically performed multiple times in the design flow, any inefficiencies in an area recovery technique can disproportionately impact the total design time. Note surprisingly, conventional area recovery techniques often create runtime bottlenecks in large chip designs.